The experience machine and the expertise defense

ABSTRACT

Recent evidence suggests that participants without extensive training in philosophy (so-called lay people) have difficulties responding consistently when confronted with Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine thought experiment. For example, some of the participants who reject the experience machine for themselves would still advise a stranger to enter the machine permanently. This and similar findings have been interpreted as evidence for implicit biases that prevent lay people from making rational decisions about whether the experience machine is preferable to real life, which might have consequences for one of the strongest objections to philosophical hedonism (the view that pleasure is the only intrinsic value). Against this consequence, it has been argued that expert philosophers are immune to such biases (the so-called expertise defense). In this paper, I report empirical evidence against this expertise defense.

KEYWORDS:

• The experience machine
• experimental philosophy
• expertise defense
• implicit bias
• meta-philosophy
• thought experiments

Acknowledgments

I thank Dimitri Mollo, Alex Wiegmann, Julian Packheiser, Elmarie Venter, Pascale Willemsen, Barbara Vetter, Juan R. Loaiza, Nina Poth, Antony Peressini and especially the anonymous reviewers for their help. I also thank the Experimental Philosophy Groups in the UK and Germany for allowing me to present earlier versions of this paper at their conferences and workshops.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is, at this point, not uncontroversial whether Weijers’ changes actually accomplish the reduction of potential biases. However, I find his recommendations plausible and refer to future research to tackle this question empirically (see especially Hindriks & Douven, 2018).

2. One of the reviewers pointed out that the stranger scenario might be problematic. Perhaps, participants imagine that the stranger is in a state with little prospects of gaining much pleasure. This would be consistent with our valuing pleasure and reality. However, the stranger scenario specifies that the stranger is a typical everyday person and not someone who is suffering. To imagine a stranger with little prospects of a pleasurable future may thus be considered an instance of overactive imagination or imaginative resistance.

3. As one anonymous reviewer pointed out, this methodology is somewhat crude. One criticism is that it is difficult to assess whether participants have imagined the vignette “properly.” To conflate imaginative resistance and overactive imagination may increase this problem. However, I take it that for the purpose of the present study, we can overlook the crudeness and focus simply on the distinction between justifications that we intuitively accept as relevant and justifications that strike us as more or less irrelevant to the issue. What interests me here is not so much a close study of how people justify their judgments, but whether their responses are prima facie paradigm cases of relevant responses one would expect from an expert.

4. One can debate whether the labels imaginative resistance and overactive imagination adequately describe all of the justifications participants gave. However, the crucial question remains whether these responses are paradigm cases of relevant responses one would expect from an expert and a justification like “girlfriend would be sad” cannot be counted as such a response.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [GRK-2185/1].

Notes on contributors

Guido Löhr

Guido Löhr is at the Ruhr University Bochum and the Institut Jean Nicod at ENS Paris (PSL). He has recent publications on concepts and embodied cognition in Synthese and Philosophical Psychology.